“These grants provide much-needed resources to support projects on the ground where wildlife trafficking is devastating some of Earth’s most cherished and most unusual species,” USFWS director Dan Ashe says in the press release. “These grant recipients are using pioneering approaches to address the illegal wildlife trade in the places where it starts and where demand for wildlife products feeds the criminal supply chain of illegal goods.”

Among the recipients are projects to train patrols to combat tiger poachers in Indonesia and another to train sniffer dogs to detect the horns of saiga, an endangered antelope species, in Kazakhstan. Several of the grants are going to projects aimed at reducing the demand for pangolins in China, Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

But the most innovative program, or at least the strangest, is a $100,000 project in Tanzania to train African pouched rats to sniff out smuggled pangolins and illegal hardwoods, reports Oliver Milan at The Guardian. The three-foot long rats have an excellent sense of smell and were previously taught to sniff out landmines by Dutch product designer Bart Weetjens. Rats from his organization APOPO have also helped doctors sniff out 5,000 cases of tuberculosis form saliva samples. Now they are being trained to do the same with pangolins, certain woods and eventually other species.

According to a project description, this initial test is just the first step in a larger project to “mainstream the rats as an innovative tool in combating the illegal wildlife trade.”

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About Jason Daley

Jason Daley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based writer specializing in natural history, science, travel, and the environment. His work has appeared in Discover, Popular Science, Outside, Men’s Journal, and other magazines.

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